Nan-Core

I decided to stop by Dad’s even though it had only been three days since I’d last seen him. Black clouds rolled across the sky at a rapid pace. Sporadic squalls of wind brought down pattering raindrops that soaked, lukewarm, into my button-down shirt. It was nearly the end of July, but the rainy season seemed to have no intention of ending.

Having resigned myself to getting a little damp, I was walking unhurriedly the under-ten-minute route from the station when, for some reason, a memory from the previous winter flashed vividly into my mind: the time I had invited everyone to dinner.

It had been the beginning of December. We all gathered at Namba for an early end-of-the-year party where we dined on crabs. The “year-end party” was just an excuse; my real motivation was to bring together Chie, my parents, and my kid brother. I knew everyone would make a big fuss if I told them beforehand, so when the day came, I brought Chie along without any advance warning.

Nothing had spoiled yet, not at that point. I’m certain every last detail of that night will continue to lurk in my memories forever, enveloped in the brilliance of those last moments right before everything started to break apart.

Mom had dyed her hair a lighter shade and put on her treasured black pearl pendant. She had scooped the crab flesh out with a practiced hand, looking happy and at times earnest as she prepped enough for Dad’s plate too.

Dad had been the same as ever, complaining the saké I poured went straight to his head, even though his smile made it clear he didn’t mean the jab wholeheartedly.

I could tell Mom and Dad had taken a shine to Chie the moment they saw her, and I was amused watching my brother, who had gone unusually meek, try to make a good impression without being too obvious about it.

As we continued to drink and the gathering grew lively that night, there was no doubt in my mind that Chie and I would get married, that we would have children, that my parents would remain healthy, anticipating a future with grandchildren coming over to play.

That all felt like it had only been a week ago. I could very nearly smell the savory steam rising from the hot pot.

Could any of us there that day have foreseen even one of the tragedies that were to come in rapid succession almost immediately afterwards?

The first was Chie’s disappearance. Less than two months had passed when it happened. With no warning at all, she stopped coming in to work and vacated her apartment.

Then, in the following spring, when I was still struggling to overcome the first surge of that shock, my Dad was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Ironically, this became the impetus that forced me out of my constant state of obsessing over Chie.

After he learned it was inoperable, my father stubbornly
refused all drug- and radiation-based treatments. Besides, the doctors said they doubted such therapies would help, even if they forced him to take them.

We were left with no choice but to accept that Dad would soon be gone. It was only natural that everyone in the family—including Dad—steeled themselves for the inexorable progression of events that would result in him passing away before Mom.

And yet she lost her life, all too soon, in a car accident two months ago.

I had never given much thought to the existence of God or fate, but I couldn’t help thinking that there was something out there, chimerical and malicious, placing spiteful traps all around me.

Another sudden squall spat rough rain and wind into my face. But the house was already visible up ahead. Between the gate and the entrance in the narrow and heavily shaded garden the stand of Nandina bamboo—no taller now than it was when I was a kid—swayed in the wind.

There was no response from inside the house after I tried pressing the intercom and knocking at the door, so I had to use my spare key. I stepped inside and noticed the house felt deserted, as though long since abandoned. I had come by a number of times when my parents had both been away, but it had never felt this vacant before. The air inside was completely transformed.

I looked around, not quite ready to venture further inside, and felt a still-raw sadness rise in my chest. The familiar single-flower vase on the shoe cupboard had a covering of chalky dust. When Mom was still alive the small glass vessel had
always boasted a fresh seasonal flower. The corridor, always polished clean, had given off a subtle waxy scent. Even when no one was in the house it had felt alive, like it was breathing.

I stuck my feet haphazardly into a pair of slippers among those scattered along the entrance to the house proper and made my way down the corridor, peering into the kitchen and the bathroom as I did. When I caught sight of my tired face that I hadn’t bothered shaving that morning reflected in the clouded mirror, I instinctively rubbed a hand along my cheek.

I tried searching the house, still probing my stubble with the tips of my fingers.

Where’d Dad go?

He visited Gran at the nursing home on Sundays, but it wasn’t a Sunday. He had mentioned he ended up taking more aimless walks now that he was living alone, but would he really go out when the weather was this poor? It was possible that he had gone to the hospital if his condition had suddenly taken a turn for the worse.

With Mom gone and Dad in his weakened state, I knew I should move back in and live with him. One of the reasons I hadn’t was because Dad didn’t want me to, and because I was unable to step away from the shop I had opened a couple of years earlier that was still running on a hand-to-mouth basis.

The shop was a cafe called Shaggy Head and was located at the foot of Mt. Hachidaka. It had a one-fifth-acre playground for dogs, and I ran it on a membership-only basis for dog owners and their pets. From there it was a three-hour round trip. Counting all the housekeeping work necessary around opening and closing times, it was pretty rough.

So, for the time being, I made do with frequent visits whenever I was able to get away from work.

At one point three generations had lived together under this roof, and while the house was old it had plenty of rooms.

On entering the living room I saw that the incense stand that had been there three days earlier had been put away, leaving only the plain-wood memorial tablet and a photograph arranged on the small bureau.

The photo was of a much younger Mom, looking directly at the camera with a slightly tense smile on her face. I stood there gazing at my mother’s image for a while, without even pressing my hands together. The pain had subsided but tears welled up in my eyes anyway, as if by conditioned reflex.

Force of habit carried me upstairs to keep looking even though I knew Dad was out. The floorboards groaned in places, on the stairs as well as along the second-floor corridor.

At the end I knocked, just in case, then opened the door to Dad’s study, really nothing more than a small room with a large bookcase. On the low table was an ashtray with a few stubbed-out cigarettes. Dad had labored to give up smoking a decade earlier, but I guessed he’d started again, having lost any reason he’d had to abstain.

A number of books and scrapbooks were stacked towards the edge of the table, all related to worldwide projects that aided children. Even when he was young and poor, Dad had always kept up donations to a number of such organizations. He subscribed to a few newsletters and was also dedicated to collecting articles and papers about children facing poverty and abuse. Once, when I was a kid, he had found me and my younger brother looking through his scrapbooks without
permission and scolded us. Come to think of it, that was the only time Dad had ever actually shouted at us; never before or since.

I decided to wait for a while in the kitchen downstairs and was just closing the door to the room when I noticed one of the sliding panels in the closet to my right was a couple inches ajar. There was something about it that piqued my interest. The closet ran the length of the wall but was halfway blocked by the bookcase and so could only be opened on one side, and therefore it was unlikely that anything but junk was stored inside.

The room was tiny but with its atmosphere of a sacred space for Dad I was wary to go in, especially in the master’s absence. Regardless, I padded over to the closet and slid the door open.

Inside was a jumble of dust-covered boxes of various sizes, all in disarray as though someone had rifled haphazardly through them. One of the boxes positioned at the front of the top shelf was open, which made me think that Dad had pulled it from the back to look inside.

What had he been hoping to find?
I reached inside, suddenly curious, but all that emerged was drab old clothing. To make matters worse, as soon as I pulled out the clothes from their orderly folds inside the box they became unwieldy and I realized it would be a task to get them back in as before.

Seeing nothing else for it I hauled the box to the floor and had begun fumbling around to get the contents back in order when I found a musty old handbag buried at the bottom. It was something a married woman might use. It was white and designed for use during the summer.

I initially assumed it had to be one of Mom’s, but when I took it in my hands and looked it over I felt an inexplicable sense of foreboding.
It’s not hers
, I decided, not knowing the source of my sudden flash of conviction.

I had never seen it before, yet it was familiar. An oddly distorted sensation crawled up from the bag, from the leather that had yellowed over time, from the rust-speckled metal of the clasp. I felt my body threaten to start trembling.

I was hit with an urge right then to put the bag back into the box and shut the lid tight, but that brought with it a mysterious pang of guilt. I used the back of my hand to wipe the sweat that had beaded up on my forehead, and, with trembling fingers, gently undid the clasp.

Inside was a small packet made of
washi
paper. The napped surface of the paper bore an inscription in faint black ink: Misako.

Carefully opening the packet, I found a bundle of hair, black, about two inches long.

Goosebumps broke out all over my skin.

It was—it had to be—a keepsake, hair from someone that had died.

Misako was Mom’s name, and her funeral had been held only two months earlier. But the hair was jet black without a single strand of white, so it couldn’t have been from then. If it was Mom’s it was something taken years ago, back when she had still been young. But who would have done that, and for what reason? Why prepare something like this, so long before her actual death?

I felt a deep sense of something sinister.

If Mom had died from an illness, perhaps then I would
have been less agitated. I realized in hindsight that she had been acting strangely in her final month. She would sometimes nod along to a conversation but not actually understand it, and she would occasionally burst into tears in the middle of watching coverage of distressing incidents on the news.